clojuresque – a Clojure plugin for Gradle

What is Gradle?

Gradle is a build system written in Java and Groovy. One advantage
of Gradle is, that the build script itself is also a Groovy script.
That means whatever can be done in Groovy can be done in the build
script. This is useful to abstract away common patterns in the build like
repetition or conditional decisions.

On top of that Gradle provides a convenient build system which comes
in form of different plugins. Each plugin defines certain conventions which
(if followed) automasie 95% of the build completely. Still the conventions
are freely configurable to be adapted to different project structures.

What is clojuresque?

clojuresque is now a plugin for Gradle, which adds Clojure
support. It allows compilation with automatic namespace recognition. The
plugin is based on the Java plugin and hooks into the standard configurations
and archives.

Contrary to the Groovy plugin, there is no special groovy configuration.
Java code in the same project might want to hook into [Clojure][] as well. So
the [Clojure][] jar must be available also to the Java portion of the project.

Caveats

Automatic recognition of namespaces only works if the ns form is the
first in the file. Comments may precede the form. The symbol is allowed
to be fully qualified: clojure.core/ns.

Clojars deployment is currently broken, because the clojars server
does not like a single Java implementation of ssh. With other servers like
the „real“ ssh it works quite well, though. I suspect the issue to be on
the clojars side.

Usage

Create a build.gradle script in the root directory of your project. Note
that gradle derives the project name from the name of this directory!

Filter

In the filesets you can specify filters with include resp. exclude.
This is fine for mostly file based languages. However clojure is strongly
based on namespaces. Therefor the clojure part of the source sets support
also clojureIncludeNamespace and clojureExcludeNamespace which can be
used to filter on the namespace name. Eg. to exclude examples from the
final jar one could use